Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 10:22 am Post subject: Is there a better term than "donation"?

Although I don't have much free time, I have been browsing the web to see if there are any blogs or posts of bugs or other problems with NeoOffice 3.2.

Interestingly, the big complaint seems to be our use of the word "donation". This seems to be a new thing even though we have funded the NeoOffice project entirely by funds or time donated by our users. Essentially, our approach is to pool funds from our users and use those funds to implement as many features and OpenOffice.org bug fixes as possible given those funds.

The potential problem that I see is that many users might be viewing our donor download service as a software purchase transaction and, as a result, are making a donation just to get the latest version of NeoOffice instead of just downloading NeoOffice 3.1.2.

We aren't going to change our approach to NeoOffice development (we are still using new donations to fund the next NeoOffice version). But do any other donors think that the term "donation" might be giving people the wrong idea of what we do?

To me, it is just a word and if people think there is better word to describe what we are trying to do with the NeoOffice project, let us know. Searching and replace a word is not a huge amount of work in our website.

Patrick_________________NeoOffice engineer

Last edited by pluby on Thu Apr 05, 2012 7:53 pm; edited 1 time in total

Another software tool I use requires a payment of a small sum - a "gift" - in return for an activation key. Repeat payments and higher amounts are encouraged but not required: gifting to the developer unlocks access to the software.

I don't know if the word gift will be seen any more positively than donation but I thought I would mention it. I guess the word gift lacks the charitable connotation that donation has.

Thanks for the feedback. I am not sure that "gift" or "subscriber" are any better so maybe I should look at this as a question of whether or not the people who actually donated think we need to change the term.

I think narrowing the question down to only an actual donor's perspective may make the question easier to answer. After all, the current donors are the people who, by their donations, have indicated that NeoOffice has some value to them and who are implicitly setting the scope of our work.

So, if any donors think we should use a term other than "donations", let us know by posting a reply. And if you have any suggestions for a better term, post that too.

I guess from my perspective the new situation is only a tiny bit different from the old Early Access Program.

In other words, people who have donated to support NeoOffice in the past are (still) getting early access to the newest versions of NeoOffice. People who haven't donated in the past have access to an older version of NeoOffice (in this case, it's even a version one that's almost identical to the newest version w/r/t things users would actually notice, other than much better 10.7 support in the newer version, and support for 10.4 and PPC in the older version, and the older version seemingly will continue to be patched for significant bugs), or, if those current non-donors decide they want access to the latest and greatest right now because they feel NeoOffice has some value to them, then they can donate a small sum and get access to it.

The differences from the past that come to mind are:
1) in the past, Early Access versions never were listed by the update sites as releases,
2) the donation threshold for the latest (Early Access) version was usually higher,
3) IIRC, previous versions sometimes were no longer patched once there was an Early Access version, and
4) at this point I don't think Patrick has said whether 3.2 will become available for free when 3.3 (or whatever the next major Neo version is) comes out.

I think people who were ignorant of the NeoOffice donations system that's been in place for years now are the people who are confused/upset by the latest version of NeoOffice requiring a previous (or at-download) donation (and possibly also by said newest version of Neo also being listed by the update sites). It also seems like there are a few die-hard FLOSS people who don't believe you ever *should* require any monetary exchange in return for access to free/open source software (even if charging for access is permitted by GPL and other FLOSS licenses).

It's unfortunate that these people are making a lot of unhappy noise about the new arrangement (and that not many of us have been posting to counter the noise; I've been swamped recently, unfortunately ). I guess, though, as long as most of these unhappy people

1) were never going to donate to support NeoOffice,
2) don't cause existing donations to drop off further because of their noise, but
3) do reduce the operating costs of NeoOffice by no longer using bandwidth Patrick has to pay for (I don't know if bandwidth costs of downloads are a significant expense, but I'm guessing they are at least a good chunk),

then I don't care about those people, and I don't feel like NeoOffice needs to change its language or survival plan to placate them.

I too agree with Patrick that "gift" or "subscription" aren't really any better terms to use. I think the most effective thing would be to re-frame the discussion to point out that everyone who has indicated, by making a small donation over the past year, that NeoOffice is valuable to them and that they want to ensure that NeoOffice continues to exist in the future, automatically has access to 3.2 now. (And also possibly to make the point that this is not very different from the old Early Access Program, although I'm not sure that re-framing is as easy or effective to make as the "if you've supported Neo in the last year, you have access" re-framing.)

Just my thoughts; curious to hear the perspectives of others.

Smokey_________________"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki

As an addendum, the one "complaint" I've seen that I feel is somewhat valid is that it's hard to find the "oldpatches" page on the NeoOffice website for people who don't want to (or can't) upgrade to 3.2.

I saw in the other forum that Patrick is re-working the patch-check code, so IIUC any patch-checks from 3.1.2 should go to the "oldpatches" page in the future. And of course the forum (+RSS) and the wiki announcements do link to the "oldpatches" page for 3.1.2 patches, if you know these resources are out there. However, if someone is just browsing the website, you can't find the "oldpatches" page (not even from 3.1.2 download page).

With the new changes in patch-check, I'm not sure if it's worth making the "oldpatches" page more visible to people browsing the site rather than arriving via patch-check, but I thought I would mention the issue.

Smokey_________________"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki

4) at this point I don't think Patrick has said whether 3.2 will become available for free when 3.3 (or whatever the next major Neo version is) comes out.

Since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will be out very soon, donations willing, we will be trying to implement some of the most likely Lion features in a 3.2.1 release. The feature that we are investigating right now is the "save as version" and "revert to saved version" feature that Apple has added in Lion.

NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta will not require any donation to download as beta users really are the people taking the risks to test out any new features so that it is as stable as possible when we release NeoOffice 3.2.1 after that Beta period ends.

However, when we release NeoOffice 3.2.1, we will not make NeoOffice 3.2 a free download. NeoOffice 3.1.2 needs to remain on our site for the Mac OS X 10.4 Intel users and for PowerPC users so NeoOffice 3.2.1 will just replace NeoOffice 3.2 on the donor download page.

If and when we get enough donations to upgrade to a newer version of LibreOffice, we will likely make the latest NeoOffice 3.2.x release a free download, but I will have to figure out how to do that without having to push NeoOffice 3.1.2 off of the download list.

sardisson wrote:

As an addendum, the one "complaint" I've seen that I feel is somewhat valid is that it's hard to find the "oldpatches" page on the NeoOffice website for people who don't want to (or can't) upgrade to 3.2.

I think the new code that I pushed to the website makes it much easier to find the latest NeoOffice 3.1.2 patch if you still running NeoOffice 3.1.2. I smiled a bit when I read that complaint this morning since I had already fixed it yesterday and was just finishing testing this morning.

To explain how the pages now work, when NeoOffice 3.1.2 does its normal patch check or you select the Help :: Check for Updates menu, you will get a the "upgrade available" dialog saying the NeoOffice 3.2 is available regardless of which patch you have installed. That has not changed. What has changed is that when you click the Download button in that dialog and the patch download page appears, you will see the following:

- If you don't have the latest NeoOffice 3.1.2 patch, you see the NeoOffice patch download links and no upgrade notice.

- If you do have the latest NeoOffice 3.1.2 patch, you see only the following "FYI" text but no urgent upgrade notice:

April is "income tax month" in both the U.S. and doing my annual tax returns reminded me why I started this forum topic: the word "donation" tends to mean a special income tax exemption in the U.S. Our donations don't meet that special income tax exemption and since roughly half of our existing donation payments have been in U.S. dollars, I keep thinking that using the word "donation" may imply something more to people than it is.

So, I have been thinking about some replacement words that I could use to make a massive search and replace on our website and in the NeoWiki articles. Also, I wanted to use words that had fairly direct translations into German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch so that I could replace those localized pages as well without much risk of mangling the existing localized pages.

Here are the replacements that I came up that I think are simple replacements and that won't confuse payments to the NeoOffice project with the U.S. income tax forms' tax exempt donations exemption:

I see no problems with those wordings. The only negative thing that came to mind was when reading "contributor" it led me to think of code contributions in the contributor/developer sense, but that's terminology I'm probably more au fait with than the average user. I don't think that's a big issue, and if the substitutions will be straightforward I say go with it.

I see no problems with those wordings. The only negative thing that came to mind was when reading "contributor" it led me to think of code contributions in the contributor/developer sense, but that's terminology I'm probably more au fait with than the average user. I don't think that's a big issue, and if the substitutions will be straightforward I say go with it.

"Contributor" did not sound very good to me either. I only used it because "payer" sounds very odd to my ears and I could not think of anything else.

Since neither of us really likes "contributor", I am thinking of just doing to the other 3 replacements at first and leave the replacement of "donors" for later. Hopefully, by then we can think up a better replacement.

How about "sponsor" instead? Sponsorship seems to be the most accurate definition of the relationship paying NeoOffice users have with the project.

Like how "contributors" implies source code contributions for some sites, "sponsors" sounds like "advertisers" to me. Maybe it is just an old American thing, but in the U.S. when I was younger you would hear "...and now a word from our sponsors" just before a television show would cut into a commercial.

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